ONE of the creators of a bizarre TV comedy has revealed that the show is based on his experiences of growing up in East Lancashire.

Steve Pemberton, from the cult BBC show League of Gentlemen, was born in Blackburn and brought up in Darwen.

And today he told how the comedy set in a fictitious northern town would have been filmed in Bacup - but it was too frightening!

The final programme in the second series of the black comedy was shown on BBC Two on Friday night and repeated yesterday. It has proved to be one of the surprise hits of the year.

A string of odd characters including a trans-sexual taxi driver, a blundering vet who accidentally kills animals and a foul-mouthed mayor are just some of the characters who populate the fictional town Royston Vasey.

Royston Vasey - the real name of comedian Chubby Brown - was originally going to be based on Bacup in Rossendale. Steve said: "When we were scouting for places we wanted to find somewhere isolated and surrounded by bleak countryside, and to have a feeling about it that something wasn't quite right.

"These friends recommended Darwen, but we never got that far - Bacup was the furthest we went into Lancashire.

"Bacup was our hot favourite but it was too frightening - when we arrived there was this cartoon drunk with a bottle shaking his fist at us. Bacup in real life was worse than Royston Vasey.

"The people who lived there were coming out with cups of tea. They had heard a rumour that Neil Morrisey of Men Behaving Badly was going to be in it. When they found out that he wasn't, they took their tea back.

"Royston Vasey is actually an amalgam of all horrible little northern towns that we knew from growing up in the area around Darwen."

The series is, in fact, set in Hadfield, Derbyshire.

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